Raid hardware

I've been discussing a lot recently the theory that Blizzard is catering to a small minority of the 3.6% of characters participating in high-end raids. So I was talking about this with some friends, some of which *are* hardcore raiders, and one of them had his own theory why this would be so: Blizzard doesn't want the bulk of the players to be able to access Molten Core / Blackwing Lair / etc. because their hardware couldn't support it.

I only have anecdotal evidence to that effect, but evidence it is: I'm on a shared chat channel with an allied guild, and Sunday suddenly my chat was swamped with "xxx is leaving the chat channel" messages. Turned out that they were all in Molten Core, and right in the middle of their raid, the Molten Core server crashed. Much anger afterwards, because the server reset, respawning all the mobs, everybody who logged back on got killed immediately, and they had to restart the raid from the beginning.

Second anecdote on raid hardware is from a friend, whose guild is at the point where they can "farm" Onyxia, and get until Ragnaros in MC, so they did their first raid into BWL. Turns out that another guild was in BWL too, at the same time, and when my friend's guild entered the dungeon, the latency shot up for the guild that was already there. That resulted in a shouting match on the BWL general chat channel, along the lines of "this dungeon can't be raided by two guilds at once, and we were here first" - "Oh yes? And how do you want to make us leave?", and ended up with both guilds getting wiped due to lag problems.

Before I wasn't even aware that each of these raid dungeons is running on a separate server. But if MC can crash without the rest of the world crashing, that must be the case. I don't know if BWL really only supports one raid at a time, or whether my friend's Horde guild simply couldn't see the couple of Alliance guilds already in BWL, but it seems that at some number of people entering the dungeon the lag increases for everybody. And the MC crash was also probably caused by overpopulation.

So unless Blizzard is upgrading their raid dungeon server hardware, it is unlikely that we will reach a point where more than a tiny percentage of people can go raiding at the same time. If Blizzard is creating other ways to gain epics, while blocking the traditional ways of guilds to learn raiding in smaller raids and progress to MC and BWL, it might be because they don't want too many people in these raid dungeons, due to hardware issues.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:46 AM Permanent Link